There’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I’m too tough for him, I say, stay in there I’m not going to let anybody see you

—Charles Bukowski

I.

Who knows. Maybe it was the “tu-wheet, tu-du” song wafting down the valley into their Megadeath-studded ears each day drove them to it, incited a taste for crushed wings, flayed embryos. Or a kind of supernatural ennui, extreme boredom of alien magnitude and throw in terminal lack of imagination that makes random violence the only reason worth getting up in the morning. At home, maybe their own songs snuffed. Someone with fists, a voice like a wrecking ball.

Hard to say what triggered the first blow, which jaded, malevolent teenager cruising the Great Falls that day noticed the trees, the trail of handmade nesting boxes. Which one thought to run for his crowbar, ignite his friends’ hatred, their nitroglycerin-laced veins to join him, make the forest a dark canvas, kingdom for their hellish art. Who knows how many blows felled fulfilled the bloody masterpiece— the wham-wham-wham of iron striking wood: yellow yolk, red bone, those illusory blue feathers labored into nightmarish relief of sixty dead birds.

II.

I know in sixth grade what it means to have stayed late, day we huddled over a fish tank— four of us with X-actos. To stab the striped bellies, slit their still-wriggling middles. To watch and say nothing as the popped, ringed eyes became marbles, filmed over, purple soup flowering from the stiff, flopped sides. (like those boys, those bird-killers) To feel nothing then except some imperceptible measure of the soul bled out: invisible rustle, phantom fluttering, a minor, feather-like commotion— to think of it now, air barely disturbed by the parting.